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Metropolitan Democratic Club/20050504
Election Reform Forum Sponsors: Metropolitan Democratic Club, May 4, 2005, College Club, Seattle Speakers: *Paul Lehto, Attorney, Snohomish County *Bev Harris, BlackBoxVoting.org Notes Prepared by Kristie Kujawski Paul Lehto, attorney (who handles fraud cases) and co-author with Dr. Jeffery Hoffman of Evidence of Election Irregularities in Snohomish County Washington, General Election 2004 When private corporations supply electronic voting equipment and then claim their technology is proprietary, we lose two important checks and balances: *'Transparent counting of votes'. With these machines, our votes are being counted in secret. Before these machines came along, when votes were hand-counted, at a minimum, there was a representative from each Party as well as a public representative watching the count. They all had to agree. This was very accurate. Secret vote counting is actually unconstitutional. *'The Recount'. Because a "recount" with these machines isn't a true recount. They just duplicate the first count, which is a farce. The machines used in Snohomish County were supposedly tested. They selected a small percentage of the machines and ran separate tests on them. If the tests went OK, they assumed all the machines were OK. However, there was some sort of problem with every one of these machines come election day. Some had their CPU's swapped out by technical support! Exit polls on election day, according to US Counts Votes, suggest that fraud occurred. Terry Neil reported on this in the Washington Post, but was careful to distance himself claiming he's not a conspiracy theorist. We need to stop being afraid of this label! A conspiracy is simply an agreement by two or more people to do something illegal. It happens all the time. Attorneys get convictions on conspiracy; it's easier to prove than other crimes. Paul and Dr Hoffman co-authored the 29-page report on the Snohomish County election, and it can be downloaded from the VotersUnite.org web site at http://www.votersunite.org/takeaction/mediaSnohomishCounty.htm . Basically, the report documents a unique test case, what's known as scientific isolation: multiple precincts using both paper ballots and touch-screen voting machines. Overall, 68% of the ballots cast were absentee (paper) and 32% were electronic. Among the paper ballots, Gregoire won by just under 2,000 votes. Among the electronic votes, Rossi won by about 8,500 votes. Why the huge win for Rossi from the electronic voting machines? In every election, without exception, there are political excuses for anomalies. For example, some say the Democrats' absentee ballot drive was much more effective than the Republicans or there was a late surge for Rossi (which is actually contradicted by the exit polls). Or, they claim "user error." Nationally, in cases where votes pushed the Kerry button and got Bush, the experts blamed the "dumb voters" for not using the machines correctly. Or even better, there was a glitch. In other words, no one is at fault. Bev Harris, BlackBoxVoting.org and the "Help America Audit" Project (and fraud investigator by background) In King County, Bev is NOT worried about felons, although someday, when all of the other issues are addressed, maybe we can focus on that. Bev is concerned about four things: *Chain of Custody of Ballots. This is critical within a large county that has 600,000 absentee ballots. County officials have now found unaccounted-for ballots three times. *Ballot Authentication. There are several points in the process where people can replace ballots. King County's absentee ballots are printed up in Everett by a Diebold printer who has had problems in the past. This time, there was a 25% spoilage rate when printing the ballots!! King County has outsourced the handling of absentee ballots to the PSI Group. They mail out the absentee ballots and handle the incoming absentee ballots. Their personnel list includes felons and immigrants who give only their first names. PSI even offers the option of having the absentee ballots delivered to the County with the envelopes opened!! Inside Access. Some people were fired or suspended before/during the count. The Diebold System used in King County can be hacked quickly by one person. The GEMS program, which is the central tabulating software, can be hacked. Someone could easily leave a virus, a self-executing program that's set to go off at a certain time, on the central computer running the GEMS program. (Bev did a demonstration with Howard Dean showing how easy it was to use Microsoft Access to alter the voting data before it was even read into the GEMS program.) King County has security issues: employees all have separate IDs and password for signing onto the computer, but everyone who signs onto the GEMS system, does so with the same User ID!! So if someone does something irregular, you can't tell who did it. Hacking with Remote Access. Bev has observed remote access to GEMS from another location. It is known that in King County, a modem hung causing GEMS to crash and there were three hours missing form the Audit Log. This is a sign of possible hacking. However, when they found this, Bev and her crew were told by King County election officials not to worry. Bev has requested a copy of the Audit Log, but she'll probably have to sue for this and other diagnostics because King County isn't being cooperative. MAJOR ISSUE: Investigators like Bev and BlackBoxVoting need to gain access to public records on a timely basis. In King County, Bev's organization requested these records on November 2nd, but the County waited until the system destroyed the logs to get around having to comply with her request. Bev has gone to meetings with King County election officials with a video camera, and has them on tape giving her complete fabrications, usually technical reasons, for why they can't give her the records. In Snohomish County, Bev is also trying to get auditing records. In Snohomish, they use the Sequoia System (same system used in Palm Beach and Piniellas Counties in Florida). When Snohomish "tested" the machines before the election, they were all perfect. On election day, 950 touch-screen machines all had errors. On 14,000 ballots, the machines "reauthenticated" the vote in the middle of the voting process. Nationally, Bev's organization is focused on three projects: Procurement of Voting Machines. Bev has found bribery that she can document in one case (watch her web site, www.blackboxvoting.org for an announcement which will discuss things like "failure to disclose," "strange bank accounts," etc.). There are HUGE amounts of money involved. Note from Kristie: In speaking with Bev after the meeting, she told me she had just returned from Cook County (Chicago) where she met with a lobbyist who was giving money to public officials to persuade them to buy a certain voting machine. There were huge sums involved. The Lobbying organization was reporting only 10% of the funds it received from the industry. The lobbyist kept telling Bev the money was "you know, for persuasion." In Ohio, the mafia is somehow involved and it was the one place she feared for her safety. Demonstrating Remote Access Hacking. Bev is not ready to make any announcements here because what she has found so far has opened up new avenues of exploration. An announcement would cause the guilty parties to shut the door and she'd never be able to explore these new avenues. Next Generation Systems. Watch Bev's web site for stories on: *Mail-in balloting *Machines for the visually impaired. These are touch-screen machines. In King County, they want one of these machines at each polling place. Bev has found that combining a single touch-screen machine with the opti-scan machines at a polling place opens the door to remote access hacking. Questions and Answers How long with the Chelan trial take? Paul Lehto was unsure. The difficulty is over the uncertainty regarding the legal standards to apply. He thought it would be close. He'd heard the Democrats had their own list of felons. What is open-source software? Software with code that is open and available to anyone. The Open Voting Consortium is a project to create open-source software. Bev is meeting with them. She has an idea for a voting machine that would produce two ballots: one would go into the ballot box and the copy would go into a publicly accessible notebook. Any touch-screen machine should only PRINT a ballot, not count ballots. Paul Lehto thinks all electronic voting machines are a problem because they cause bottlenecks at the polling place: people have to wait in line for a machine. Plus, people don't understand these machines and need to in order to have confidence in the process. Will Paul Lehto and his lawyer, Randy Gordon, ever settle their suit with Snohomish County out of court? Do they need help with the costs? Paul and Randy are bearing the cost and will not settle out of court. Why isn't this being covered by the media? Bev said she's been on TV over 100 times and in the print media over 2,000 times. To get coverage, they MUST have a news tie-in. Paul's lawsuit, with two opposing sides, is "newsworthy" to the media. With a jury you have an attention span that lasts days. As far as media coverage, Paul said the article in last week's Real Change was the best so far on the Snohomish lawsuit. Does the bribery case involve one or both political parties? Bev said that BOTH parties are involved. And as you go higher in the chain among public election officials, you get more resistance. Bev describes herself as an Independent who tends toward the Democrats about 80% of the time. On the Board of BlackBoxVoting, she has Democrats, Republicans, a Libertarian, and a Green. Her board is also ethnically diverse, and she's glad because her investigations are also turning up evidence of members of the minority communities taking money for pushing certain voting machines on communities. Paul doesn't think election fraud is a partisan issue. While Snohomish County was deciding whether to sign a contract with Sequoia for the touch-screen machines, Sam Reed, WA Secretary of State, called and left a message on the voice mail of the Snohomish County Council members expressing his confidence in the Sequoia. More powerful than partisanship is this "herd mentality." Reed lobbied for Sequoia just after they became an approved vendor. For a while, they were the only approved vendor, and Snohomish County went with Sequoia without a competitive bid. Once the contract between Snohomish and Sequoia was signed, the State approved two more vendors. What is your ideal system? Paul Lehto: Paper ballots, hand-counted with election day as a national holiday. Or, scanning the ballots with random samples hand-counted. If there are discrepancies, stop the scanning and do hand count. Fast voting is like fast food. We need slow voting. Bev: Paper ballots with unfettered access to the hand counting by observers. And if ballots are printed by electronic voting machines, have copies in the binders which anyone can access. At some point before the election, Diebold began pushing its "top secret" system, Vote Remote, for absentee ballots. All of a sudden states started pushing these cookie-cutter bills through their legislatures regarding mail-in ballots. The vendor was behind these bills. This system involves converting all signatures on the voter registration form to a TIFF file. Then they scan the signature on the envelope with the absentee ballot and match it with the signature on the voter registration TIFF file. This system was used in King County and in Los Angeles County. Aren't paper ballots used in Canada where they spend 25% as much as we do per person? Bev said that Canada's national elections have only 3 or 4 questions on them. What's happening in Ohio? Bev said that she met with someone form another organization who is investigating voting anomalies in Ohio and he has documentation piled 7 feet high. Ohio used punch cards, but they are buying Diebold machines. A lot of the vote counting in Ohio took place in secret. Bev requested records from 88 counties, but the Secretary of State refused to provide the records. The Florida election results are also questionable, but again, the issue has been getting records for auditing purposes. Paul said that the recent legislation passed in Olympia requiring a paper trail won't accomplish anything. In Washington (?), the budgets for administration have tripled the past three years. This is just operating costs and does not include any purchase of new voting equipment. Bev wondered why this is happening and what's being done with the money? Is this for full time technicians to manage these new systems? Bev is concerned that no one has done any cost/benefit analysis on this new technology. The Sequoia system supposedly saves $400,000, but it's proving more costly due to support costs. A lot of the problems with electronic voting occur at the tabulator level, and once results are announced, it's hard to retract them. The problem is secret counting. This is what we must focus on. Electronic voting machines -- with secret vote counting and the inability to have a true recount if necessary-- represents a WAIVER OF OUR RIGHTS as American citizens. Do not equate ATM machines with electronic voting machines. They're not the same. How long will Paul's Snohomish County trial take? This is a declaratory judgment action, which is usually expedited, i.e., a trial is expected within 12 months (and they just filed). Then there's Discovery, then some motions, maybe an appellate court review, and finally, it may go to the Supreme Court. It could take the next 3-4 years if it goes all the way. *Why are elected officials in King Co and elsewhere uncooperative? Because humans are humans. *State officials fear an erosion of public confidence in the electoral process and so they tend to downplay any problems *Officials know what the media can do to them once they're blamed for a problem. *Officials fear that any problems will reflect poorly on their political party. *Officials tend to hang together and protect each other, especially from the Press which can be unfair. *Current laws support their efforts to keep things secret. Bev emphasized that there are vast amounts of money greasing election fraud. Almost everyone is getting paid. She recently spoke with someone from Europe who explained the various creative ways that people can be paid off, including the Dutch Sandwich Corporation. In some cases lobbyists aren't registered and in other cases they've disclosed only 10% of what they spend. In Cook County, they use the money for "persuasion" according to one lobbyist. Closing Statements Bev Harris: We need to grasp the scope of this issue. Bev feels her organization is still trying to determine the full scope of the problem. What citizens can do right now is to: Identify officials (keep close watch on "revolvers," who go back and forth from government to industry jobs) who are too friendly with the vendors and tie a can to their tails. Let everyone know. (BlackBoxVoting used to have a "Gotta Go" list.) Give or volunteer with BlackBoxVoting, which relies heavily on volunteers in the states where they're conducting investigations. Paul Lehto: Read his 29-page study, which is on the internet. It discusses things like Rossi getting over 50% of the votes on malfunctioning machines. Be careful of any legislation you propose. Activists could make mistakes. For example, requiring open source software doesn't solve the secret vote counting issue. And requiring governments to use open source could open them up to lawsuits from corporations. Procedures are important. Pay attention to the election procedures being used. The attitude of public election officials is important.